...but the number of racist assholes posting to this thread makes me think it's time to require that people selling homes in neighbourhoods with a very high proportion of white people (say, more than 95%) be required to sell only to members of ethnic minorities.
Now, that may not be politically correct (in the real sense of the term - comments you can't make in public without people getting all huffy and blackballing you), but it's pretty much the only way we're going to get out of this "OMG! BLACK PEOPLE! LET'S NOT GO THERE!" rut.
Minor pedantic point: Actually Amazon can issue a patch that would add Bluetooth, as the hardware is all there already (there's a similar situation in the Nook, and third party Android distributions for the Nook do enable it.)
It's not 100% clear why Amazon left out BT support in the OS, might be a "Don't want to spend cash on licensing unnecessary patents" thing (although I thought BT was clear of that.) The Fire also has an FM radio.
Your points about the other things still stand, obviously. It's disappointing the Fire doesn't have these, but ultimately it's extremely good at doing what it's designed to do.
You're not really contradicting what the guy said. It's not as if Obama has strayed at all from his predecessor's policies on war, executive supremacy, and foreign policy.
Thankfully not for much longer. Both carriers are moving over to LTE, and LTE is the latest version of GSM - and includes GSM's SIM card mandate as a result.
By "Both" I assume you mean a specialized 3D story. But you immediately raise a red flag by requiring "Sensible spending". 3D is expensive to do right. So that's not really much of a choice.
From a business point of view, it makes even more sense to go for option 2 (which was not the "dumb" one!) because you can produce a cheaper, more specialized (and hence easier to make), movie that's respected by its intended audience and still attract the same audience figures as you'd get producing a big budget 3D crossover movie.
Hollywood is painting itself into a box with the 3D thing, It just isn't possible to produce consistently high quality, profitable, 3D. Yes, you can produce one or two movies that fit the bill, but the reality is the vast majority of 3D movies serve to drive away audiences.
This isn't like color or sound, where the features may have added to the cost, but they enabled much higher quality movies that attracted much larger audiences. This is a technology that adds to the cost, and drives away audiences, and you can only make up for both by cutting corners and trying to produce movies aimed at the lowest common denominator.
Now imagine, for the sake of argument, you're running a business. You're making a movie, and you need to attract enough people to watch it to make it profitable.
Now, let's suppose that 1/3 of the likely movie going population are children, 1/3 adult women, and 1/3 adult men. Now, also consider the fact that 100% of people interested in a movie and prepared to go to the cinema to watch it will do so if it's 2D, but only 50% would if it's 3D.
What do you think makes the most amount of sense?
Find some way to make a movie that will be enjoyed by children and adults, of either gender, alike.
Make a movie in 2D aimed at a specific audience.
If you answered the first, you're Hollywood right now. You're forced to make crappy crossover movies because you've convinced yourself that 3D is the future and can't find any other way to make up for the loss of audience you're getting in doing 3D.
You're going to go to the movies if it's a good movie whether it's 3D or 2D. I'm *not* going to watch a movie in 3D (it's physically uncomfortable.)
If Hollywood wants to double their audiences, they need to drop 3D. End of story. You may like 3D, you may not like it being withdrawn, but the hard reality is that they don't get the full audience when they make movies that require 3D.
And ditch 3D. Yes, 50% of the audience likes it. But they're going to come anyway, 3D or 2D. Nobody ever refused to go to the cinema because a movie was 2D. The people you need to be concerned about are the 50% who no longer go to the cinema because they hate it.
Yeah. I can't see the appeal in a product you can take anywhere, use for 10 hours, and provides quick and ready access to the internet and multimedia resources, and has a powerful enough processor to play many kinds of games
If that were the appeal, don't you think the vastly more powerful Android devices, that support Flash, have more appropriate screens for multimedia, have better storage, and much more powerful CPUs, and are lower cost to boot, would be kicking the iPad's ass?
And please don't give me the "But... Android is teh succks!" crap. I've used both. Android's more than good enough outside of a few low end $150 devices. The sum total of a decent Honeycomb tablet is considerably more than an iPad, and yet the latter are selling?
Why? Because with very few exceptions, most people who get tablets do so because they look slick. And those tablets end up going into a drawer after a few weeks and that's it.
Trust me, I've done the research, as a T-Mobile customer looking for an exit. All the other choices, ALL OF THEM, sucked. MetroPCS until recently were, with Cricket, one of the most locked down operators, but they're opening up a little with the move to LTE. I don't trust their culture to keep at it for now any more than I trust Verizon.
T-Mobile is the ONE operator that's pro-openness. GSM (bring your own device) from the start, no restrictions on how you use data, until the AT&T stuff started they even offered low cost, subsidy free, contract free talk plans. There's a reason it was T-Mo, and not AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint, who Google picked to launch Android.
There's risks and benefits to each approach. But realistically:
Resale is a part problem. The reality is that most console games are sold at a price that is only acceptable because a significant proportion of game buyers know they can resale the game. Inevitably, the market is going to price online downloads at a lower price (which is fine, because there should be more sales) if the games cannot be transfered.
Upgrading the hard drive shouldn't be a major issue. A 1T drive should be able to fit around... well, even if all games distributed via BD took up all of a dual layer disc (no, they don't) you'd be looking at 20 games. But in reality, we can probably multiply that figure by ten. Additionally, the most likely implementation would be based upon the current model used by Steam, Android Market, Amazon, et al, where the software is essentially "in the cloud", able to be deleted locally and redownloaded at any point at no extra charge. So even if Microsoft decided not to allow upgrade via an external USB drive or similar, the issue just woudn't arise for 99% of users.
Bandwidth limits are a disappearing issue. Yes, some people are always going to be stuck with only what a cellular operator or satellite provider provides them, but 90%+ of consoles are going to be sold in markets with no issues whatsoever. At this point, bandwidth caps for cable and DSL are in the hundreds of gigabytes for all but the most budget plans.
The physical security of owning a game is a concern, but we've seen attempts to retroactively delete content backfire whenever it's occurred, and Sony and Microsoft would be off their heads doing so in the context of games, especially given a situation where they own the markets - this isn't like online video or books where the content is subject to agreements between rival International publishers where any significant differences in copyright laws between jurisdictions has a major affect on what can be published. There's no excuse for Microsoft or Sony to do this, and if they did, they'd undermine their platform significantly.
I'm not saying any of those are non-concerns, but I am saying they're not enough to cover the advantages of such a system. Rather than wait for games to be delivered, you just browse, click buy, and then as soon as enough of the game has been downloaded and cached you start playing. And maybe you don't click buy, maybe you're a subscriber and you get the game as part of an all-you-can-eat plan, in which case you don't have to do anything but pay your subscription. Meanwhile there are no plastic discs to lose or destroy. And it becomes easier for publishers to offer extras, like not having to buy full copy of the game for every console if you want to do an in-home multiplayer thing.
I'd be very comfortable for a console like that. If Microsoft doesn't do it, maybe Steam should partner with a PC maker and put one together.
Why are you comparing the speed it takes to download a game over the Internet onto your hard drive with the time taken to read from an optical disk?
Valid comparisons you could have made:
- Time taken for a Blu-ray to arrive at your home with one day shipping (around half a kilobyte a second) vs downloading via a crappy DSL connection (somewhat faster.) - DSL FTW
- Time taken for bytes to load from an optical disk (36-144Mbps) vs from a normal SATA hard disk (usually measured in gigabits per second.) - hard disks FTW.
In fairness, if you have a store selling games around the corner, you might be able to beat the first metric, but who gives a crap?
The ability of discs for games to magically appear in your hands the moment they're released has been somewhat overstated;-) Typically, at the very least, you have to go to store to get them, or wait for the mailman to deliver them.
In case it wasn't obvious, you'd be storing your games on the hard disk. You download once - when you buy the game. And it shouldn't take 24 hours - hell, I bought the entire GTA suite from Steam the other day (GTA 1-4, VC, SA, LCS, and BGT) and it took a few hours to download, not all day.
That's how the rest of the world is going. It's how games should be too.
If they have any sense they'll resist putting in a disk to begin with. Saying "Oh, you need Blu-ray to be future proof" is laughable. The format isn't going anywhere, despite the best efforts of Hollywood to save it, the entire world is going online.
The '720 et al should be given a 1T hard disk (with the ability to add larger capacity drives when that fills up.
I disagree with both of you. As can be seen here Amazon is very much describing it as part of the Kindle family. It does appear in the tablet category too, but so do a lot of devices that have never been described as "iPad killers".
The Fire is a media player. It's a platform for Amazon to sell some types of books, movies, music, and games. It is not intended to be a general computing device, an "iPad killer", or any other baloney. At the very least, if Amazon intended it to be, they'd have added a camera.
And if those were the only objective tests, then that'd be something, but:
* How many women buy high heeled shoes for dancing?
* How many shoes actually put women at eye to eye level with anyone?
And are there other designs that would satisfy both requirements? (Answer, of course!)
The "arguable" one, of course, is the right answer, but go back to the analogy and tell me that it doesn't fit in to my argument that the iPad is the "high heeled shoe" of computing.
How many other items whose size is in the same ball park as the iPad do you see people voluntarily habitually carrying around?
The Kindle Fire is, at least, about the same size as a reporter's notebook, which is about as big as anything gets before they start insisting it goes into a bag or has a shoulder strap.
Now, I know you're saying "But you missed my point! Letter size PDFs!", and I understand that, but what you have there is a requirement that's not satisfied with today's technology, rather than a requirement that the iPad satisfies by being big. You can either have big, or genuinely portable. In the long run, the real solution is the one the iPad puts off - moving away from content formatted for larger pages.
You missed one objective test: to put the wearer on eye-to-eye level with the people they are talking to
That's not generally the function of a shoe, and even if it was that'd be a pretty much impossible to meet requirement. Nor is a high heel objectively a good implementation of that concept - platforms would satisfy the other requirements of a shoe without undermining the central purpose of a shoe (to protect the foot and keep it comfortable while walking.)
And the iPad is, objectively, the most useful tablet out there. Your analogy is absurd.
No, the iPad is, objectively, one of the least useful tablets out there, for the reasons I stated. It's too large to be carried around like the PDAs its intended to replace, it's too locked down to work as a general purpose computing device, and it lacks the input devices, compatibility, and power you see in the Netbooks Jobs said it was an answer to.
You are a nerd. Your analogy should be sneakers vs. boots
No, my analogy is with high heeled shoes. Objectively a shoe is something you walk around in intended to protect the feet against the ground, ensure a decent grip, and ensure the experience of walking is comfortable. High heeled shoes are a great example of something popular despite the requirements, that are only popular because of aesthetic qualities.
The iPad is more or less the same. Objectively, a portable computing device should be small enough that carrying it around isn't awkward (the iPad is the size of folder or clipboard, neither of which is something you see many people carrying around all the time unless they have to), and shouldn't contain unnecessary constraints on how its used. In both cases, the iPad fails. As if to make matters worse, what it does do it does badly. In almost all cases, a Netbook will have a better, more accessible, more friendly and familiar way of doing the same thing, but - and here the high heeled shoe analogy really comes into its own - the iPad will simply make it look better. You can swipe something with a cute animation and it looks slick. You can't do nearly as much, but what you can do looks good.
Sneakers vs boots is a really bad analogy because people don't buy either primarily to look good. (Well, except high heeled boots I guess, but those aren't the boots we're talking about.) High heeled shoes are popular only because of looks, not because they're practical.
That's the problem with the iPad. And sitting there going "Wah, you don't understand me and I think the iPad is the best therefore you're arrogant!" is pretty arrogant by itself. The iPad is more expensive and less functional than its Android cousins, but the latter aren't selling. They would be if the functionality, rather than the looks, was what was driving iPad sales. That's the objective truth.
Hang on, how is a crack-head's addiction a consequence of the war on drugs?
Can't speak for crack, but take note of the situation in Britain prior to the War on Drugs concerning Heroin. Prior to its outright banning, Heroin was available via the health service and on prescription. If someone was addicted to Heroin, then Doctors could - and did - provide the victim with a prescription because, well, actually good clean Heroin isn't particularly dangerous if taken in controlled doses.
No, really. It isn't. Heroin is dangerous today because it's cut with all kinds of crap, because victims can't control the dose of something whose consistency is variable, because it's hard to get advice on exactly how much to take through trusted channels, and because, of course, buying heroin inherently puts you under the influence of some unpleasant people. But, I digress...
Anyway, that was the situation. Now, that meant there were millions of Heroin addicts, right? I mean, anyone who was addicted could get Heroin, and because it was on the NHS, it was practically free! Woo! Free, safe, heroin! Must have been flying off the shelves, right?
No. You see, it was in nobody's interests to sell/push/whatever heroin. So most people never came across it. Most heroin not "in the system" (ie in a pharmacy's vault) was owned by the addicts themselves, who certainly weren't going to share if they could help it. Pharmaceutical companies who manufactured the stuff were strictly regulated. The result is that there were less than a thousand (in a county of 50 million) addicts back in 1970.
The figure went up to the six digits when Heroin was banned. Why? Well, because addicts became dependent upon organized crime for their supply, and organized crime thus had an incentive to start pushing heroin onto people who'd never normally try it. And it wasn't a few hundred people with a safe supply any more, it was hundreds of thousands of victims taking a very dangerous form of the drug.
The War on Drugs is stupid, bad, policy. It enables a system that creates victims that wouldn't otherwise exist, it causes crime and grows criminal syndicates, and it appears to be utterly unnecessary. At the end of the day, whether it's Rush Limbaugh taking Oxycontin, or Hunter S. Thompson taking... well, anything and everything... why is the government involved in the first place beyond banning direct anti-social behavior (for example, driving under the influence) and guaranteeing consistent high quality?
No, it's a modern media player. The concept is pretty obvious: Amazon wants a channel through which it can sell you movies, games, and music. The device has a few extras like a web browser - but so does my keyboard Kindle and that's unambiguously an eBook reader.
The iPad is more of a descendant of the PDA. A big, clumsy, locked down, descendant that owes its success more because of the style police than anything else, but that's where Jobs was coming from, wanting a cut down personal computer device.
Personally, I think the Fire is a better device than the iPad. I mean this not in the sense that they're comparable within the same market - they're not , they're aimed at different markets - but in the sense that one is well designed for its intended use, and the other just plain isn't. Sure, the Fire has some teething problems, but it's been designed at a good price point, is a good size, and has the right feature set. The iPad... not so much. Expensive, oversized, and too locked down for its intended purpose.
Yes, the latter has been successful. So are high heeled shoes, which fail every objective test for the usefulness of a shoe. Just saying.
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No. You can always not sell your home until you get the price you want
And BTW, did it occur to you that if black people can't afford your prices, there might be a reason for that?
Oh dear.
Now, that may not be politically correct (in the real sense of the term - comments you can't make in public without people getting all huffy and blackballing you), but it's pretty much the only way we're going to get out of this "OMG! BLACK PEOPLE! LET'S NOT GO THERE!" rut.
Minor pedantic point: Actually Amazon can issue a patch that would add Bluetooth, as the hardware is all there already (there's a similar situation in the Nook, and third party Android distributions for the Nook do enable it.)
It's not 100% clear why Amazon left out BT support in the OS, might be a "Don't want to spend cash on licensing unnecessary patents" thing (although I thought BT was clear of that.) The Fire also has an FM radio.
Here's the cite: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1350119
Your points about the other things still stand, obviously. It's disappointing the Fire doesn't have these, but ultimately it's extremely good at doing what it's designed to do.
You're not really contradicting what the guy said. It's not as if Obama has strayed at all from his predecessor's policies on war, executive supremacy, and foreign policy.
I rather liked someone's Tweet on the subject: "From now on, Santorum will always be synonymous with coming in number 2."
Thankfully not for much longer. Both carriers are moving over to LTE, and LTE is the latest version of GSM - and includes GSM's SIM card mandate as a result.
By "Both" I assume you mean a specialized 3D story. But you immediately raise a red flag by requiring "Sensible spending". 3D is expensive to do right. So that's not really much of a choice.
From a business point of view, it makes even more sense to go for option 2 (which was not the "dumb" one!) because you can produce a cheaper, more specialized (and hence easier to make), movie that's respected by its intended audience and still attract the same audience figures as you'd get producing a big budget 3D crossover movie.
Hollywood is painting itself into a box with the 3D thing, It just isn't possible to produce consistently high quality, profitable, 3D. Yes, you can produce one or two movies that fit the bill, but the reality is the vast majority of 3D movies serve to drive away audiences.
This isn't like color or sound, where the features may have added to the cost, but they enabled much higher quality movies that attracted much larger audiences. This is a technology that adds to the cost, and drives away audiences, and you can only make up for both by cutting corners and trying to produce movies aimed at the lowest common denominator.
Now imagine, for the sake of argument, you're running a business. You're making a movie, and you need to attract enough people to watch it to make it profitable.
Now, let's suppose that 1/3 of the likely movie going population are children, 1/3 adult women, and 1/3 adult men. Now, also consider the fact that 100% of people interested in a movie and prepared to go to the cinema to watch it will do so if it's 2D, but only 50% would if it's 3D.
What do you think makes the most amount of sense?
If you answered the first, you're Hollywood right now. You're forced to make crappy crossover movies because you've convinced yourself that 3D is the future and can't find any other way to make up for the loss of audience you're getting in doing 3D.
If you answered the second, you're sane.
Yes, it should. You're missing the point.
You're going to go to the movies if it's a good movie whether it's 3D or 2D. I'm *not* going to watch a movie in 3D (it's physically uncomfortable.)
If Hollywood wants to double their audiences, they need to drop 3D. End of story. You may like 3D, you may not like it being withdrawn, but the hard reality is that they don't get the full audience when they make movies that require 3D.
And ditch 3D. Yes, 50% of the audience likes it. But they're going to come anyway, 3D or 2D. Nobody ever refused to go to the cinema because a movie was 2D. The people you need to be concerned about are the 50% who no longer go to the cinema because they hate it.
If that were the appeal, don't you think the vastly more powerful Android devices, that support Flash, have more appropriate screens for multimedia, have better storage, and much more powerful CPUs, and are lower cost to boot, would be kicking the iPad's ass?
And please don't give me the "But... Android is teh succks!" crap. I've used both. Android's more than good enough outside of a few low end $150 devices. The sum total of a decent Honeycomb tablet is considerably more than an iPad, and yet the latter are selling?
Why? Because with very few exceptions, most people who get tablets do so because they look slick. And those tablets end up going into a drawer after a few weeks and that's it.
CDMA, and it doesn't allow tethering...
Trust me, I've done the research, as a T-Mobile customer looking for an exit. All the other choices, ALL OF THEM, sucked. MetroPCS until recently were, with Cricket, one of the most locked down operators, but they're opening up a little with the move to LTE. I don't trust their culture to keep at it for now any more than I trust Verizon.
T-Mobile is the ONE operator that's pro-openness. GSM (bring your own device) from the start, no restrictions on how you use data, until the AT&T stuff started they even offered low cost, subsidy free, contract free talk plans. There's a reason it was T-Mo, and not AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint, who Google picked to launch Android.
Resale is a part problem. The reality is that most console games are sold at a price that is only acceptable because a significant proportion of game buyers know they can resale the game. Inevitably, the market is going to price online downloads at a lower price (which is fine, because there should be more sales) if the games cannot be transfered.
Upgrading the hard drive shouldn't be a major issue. A 1T drive should be able to fit around... well, even if all games distributed via BD took up all of a dual layer disc (no, they don't) you'd be looking at 20 games. But in reality, we can probably multiply that figure by ten. Additionally, the most likely implementation would be based upon the current model used by Steam, Android Market, Amazon, et al, where the software is essentially "in the cloud", able to be deleted locally and redownloaded at any point at no extra charge. So even if Microsoft decided not to allow upgrade via an external USB drive or similar, the issue just woudn't arise for 99% of users.
Bandwidth limits are a disappearing issue. Yes, some people are always going to be stuck with only what a cellular operator or satellite provider provides them, but 90%+ of consoles are going to be sold in markets with no issues whatsoever. At this point, bandwidth caps for cable and DSL are in the hundreds of gigabytes for all but the most budget plans.
The physical security of owning a game is a concern, but we've seen attempts to retroactively delete content backfire whenever it's occurred, and Sony and Microsoft would be off their heads doing so in the context of games, especially given a situation where they own the markets - this isn't like online video or books where the content is subject to agreements between rival International publishers where any significant differences in copyright laws between jurisdictions has a major affect on what can be published. There's no excuse for Microsoft or Sony to do this, and if they did, they'd undermine their platform significantly.
I'm not saying any of those are non-concerns, but I am saying they're not enough to cover the advantages of such a system. Rather than wait for games to be delivered, you just browse, click buy, and then as soon as enough of the game has been downloaded and cached you start playing. And maybe you don't click buy, maybe you're a subscriber and you get the game as part of an all-you-can-eat plan, in which case you don't have to do anything but pay your subscription. Meanwhile there are no plastic discs to lose or destroy. And it becomes easier for publishers to offer extras, like not having to buy full copy of the game for every console if you want to do an in-home multiplayer thing.
I'd be very comfortable for a console like that. If Microsoft doesn't do it, maybe Steam should partner with a PC maker and put one together.
Why are you comparing the speed it takes to download a game over the Internet onto your hard drive with the time taken to read from an optical disk?
Valid comparisons you could have made:
- Time taken for a Blu-ray to arrive at your home with one day shipping (around half a kilobyte a second) vs downloading via a crappy DSL connection (somewhat faster.) - DSL FTW
- Time taken for bytes to load from an optical disk (36-144Mbps) vs from a normal SATA hard disk (usually measured in gigabits per second.) - hard disks FTW.
In fairness, if you have a store selling games around the corner, you might be able to beat the first metric, but who gives a crap?
The ability of discs for games to magically appear in your hands the moment they're released has been somewhat overstated ;-) Typically, at the very least, you have to go to store to get them, or wait for the mailman to deliver them.
In case it wasn't obvious, you'd be storing your games on the hard disk. You download once - when you buy the game. And it shouldn't take 24 hours - hell, I bought the entire GTA suite from Steam the other day (GTA 1-4, VC, SA, LCS, and BGT) and it took a few hours to download, not all day.
That's how the rest of the world is going. It's how games should be too.
If they have any sense they'll resist putting in a disk to begin with. Saying "Oh, you need Blu-ray to be future proof" is laughable. The format isn't going anywhere, despite the best efforts of Hollywood to save it, the entire world is going online.
The '720 et al should be given a 1T hard disk (with the ability to add larger capacity drives when that fills up.
I disagree with both of you. As can be seen here Amazon is very much describing it as part of the Kindle family. It does appear in the tablet category too, but so do a lot of devices that have never been described as "iPad killers".
The Fire is a media player. It's a platform for Amazon to sell some types of books, movies, music, and games. It is not intended to be a general computing device, an "iPad killer", or any other baloney. At the very least, if Amazon intended it to be, they'd have added a camera.
* How many women buy high heeled shoes for dancing?
* How many shoes actually put women at eye to eye level with anyone?
And are there other designs that would satisfy both requirements? (Answer, of course!)
The "arguable" one, of course, is the right answer, but go back to the analogy and tell me that it doesn't fit in to my argument that the iPad is the "high heeled shoe" of computing.
How many other items whose size is in the same ball park as the iPad do you see people voluntarily habitually carrying around?
The Kindle Fire is, at least, about the same size as a reporter's notebook, which is about as big as anything gets before they start insisting it goes into a bag or has a shoulder strap.
Now, I know you're saying "But you missed my point! Letter size PDFs!", and I understand that, but what you have there is a requirement that's not satisfied with today's technology, rather than a requirement that the iPad satisfies by being big. You can either have big, or genuinely portable. In the long run, the real solution is the one the iPad puts off - moving away from content formatted for larger pages.
That's not generally the function of a shoe, and even if it was that'd be a pretty much impossible to meet requirement. Nor is a high heel objectively a good implementation of that concept - platforms would satisfy the other requirements of a shoe without undermining the central purpose of a shoe (to protect the foot and keep it comfortable while walking.)
No, the iPad is, objectively, one of the least useful tablets out there, for the reasons I stated. It's too large to be carried around like the PDAs its intended to replace, it's too locked down to work as a general purpose computing device, and it lacks the input devices, compatibility, and power you see in the Netbooks Jobs said it was an answer to.
No, my analogy is with high heeled shoes. Objectively a shoe is something you walk around in intended to protect the feet against the ground, ensure a decent grip, and ensure the experience of walking is comfortable. High heeled shoes are a great example of something popular despite the requirements, that are only popular because of aesthetic qualities.
The iPad is more or less the same. Objectively, a portable computing device should be small enough that carrying it around isn't awkward (the iPad is the size of folder or clipboard, neither of which is something you see many people carrying around all the time unless they have to), and shouldn't contain unnecessary constraints on how its used. In both cases, the iPad fails. As if to make matters worse, what it does do it does badly. In almost all cases, a Netbook will have a better, more accessible, more friendly and familiar way of doing the same thing, but - and here the high heeled shoe analogy really comes into its own - the iPad will simply make it look better. You can swipe something with a cute animation and it looks slick. You can't do nearly as much, but what you can do looks good.
Sneakers vs boots is a really bad analogy because people don't buy either primarily to look good. (Well, except high heeled boots I guess, but those aren't the boots we're talking about.) High heeled shoes are popular only because of looks, not because they're practical.
That's the problem with the iPad. And sitting there going "Wah, you don't understand me and I think the iPad is the best therefore you're arrogant!" is pretty arrogant by itself. The iPad is more expensive and less functional than its Android cousins, but the latter aren't selling. They would be if the functionality, rather than the looks, was what was driving iPad sales. That's the objective truth.
Can't speak for crack, but take note of the situation in Britain prior to the War on Drugs concerning Heroin. Prior to its outright banning, Heroin was available via the health service and on prescription. If someone was addicted to Heroin, then Doctors could - and did - provide the victim with a prescription because, well, actually good clean Heroin isn't particularly dangerous if taken in controlled doses.
No, really. It isn't. Heroin is dangerous today because it's cut with all kinds of crap, because victims can't control the dose of something whose consistency is variable, because it's hard to get advice on exactly how much to take through trusted channels, and because, of course, buying heroin inherently puts you under the influence of some unpleasant people. But, I digress...
Anyway, that was the situation. Now, that meant there were millions of Heroin addicts, right? I mean, anyone who was addicted could get Heroin, and because it was on the NHS, it was practically free! Woo! Free, safe, heroin! Must have been flying off the shelves, right?
No. You see, it was in nobody's interests to sell/push/whatever heroin. So most people never came across it. Most heroin not "in the system" (ie in a pharmacy's vault) was owned by the addicts themselves, who certainly weren't going to share if they could help it. Pharmaceutical companies who manufactured the stuff were strictly regulated. The result is that there were less than a thousand (in a county of 50 million) addicts back in 1970.
The figure went up to the six digits when Heroin was banned. Why? Well, because addicts became dependent upon organized crime for their supply, and organized crime thus had an incentive to start pushing heroin onto people who'd never normally try it. And it wasn't a few hundred people with a safe supply any more, it was hundreds of thousands of victims taking a very dangerous form of the drug.
The War on Drugs is stupid, bad, policy. It enables a system that creates victims that wouldn't otherwise exist, it causes crime and grows criminal syndicates, and it appears to be utterly unnecessary. At the end of the day, whether it's Rush Limbaugh taking Oxycontin, or Hunter S. Thompson taking... well, anything and everything... why is the government involved in the first place beyond banning direct anti-social behavior (for example, driving under the influence) and guaranteeing consistent high quality?
No, it's a modern media player. The concept is pretty obvious: Amazon wants a channel through which it can sell you movies, games, and music. The device has a few extras like a web browser - but so does my keyboard Kindle and that's unambiguously an eBook reader.
The iPad is more of a descendant of the PDA. A big, clumsy, locked down, descendant that owes its success more because of the style police than anything else, but that's where Jobs was coming from, wanting a cut down personal computer device.
Personally, I think the Fire is a better device than the iPad. I mean this not in the sense that they're comparable within the same market - they're not , they're aimed at different markets - but in the sense that one is well designed for its intended use, and the other just plain isn't. Sure, the Fire has some teething problems, but it's been designed at a good price point, is a good size, and has the right feature set. The iPad... not so much. Expensive, oversized, and too locked down for its intended purpose.
Yes, the latter has been successful. So are high heeled shoes, which fail every objective test for the usefulness of a shoe. Just saying.